Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's more than physics at all, what's the extra bit?
Well, I guess a fancy narrative.
Even that is physics.
The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
41–50 of 225 posts
Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
#42On the one hand, this is extremely cool science. OTOH, English really needs another word, meaning "like intelligence, but it could be simulated by an analog computer with a good handful of of discrete components".
You can't simulate the intelligence of a cell using just a handfull of analogue components. Cell intelligence is still beyond us. People tend to underestimated cells just like you do here.
Article subtitle: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
I'm not thinking of simulating the whole cell. And last I heard, a DC full of computers can't fully simulate one sucrose molecule.
Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
#43> We don’t yet have the technology to just observe all of the activity inside a living cell. How close are we to being able to make a map of all atoms within a cell? There are 1E23 atoms in 1 ml of water, and an ecoli is about 500nmx500nmx1um. That means there are only about 2E10 atoms in the whole cell! Would it be possible to somehow freeze a whole cell, then use an electron beam to knock off and identify (via mass…
We’re pretty close. There’s TEM microscopy tech which basically tilts a sample to get a bunch of lines, which is then reconstructed as a 3d model.
It’s stupid expensive though, and you can only really identify whole proteins. But you can do that in context, which is massive
Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
#44On the one hand, this is extremely cool science. OTOH, English really needs another word, meaning "like intelligence, but it could be simulated by an analog computer with a good handful of of discrete components".
You can't simulate the intelligence of a cell using just a handfull of analogue components. Cell intelligence is still beyond us. People tend to underestimated cells just like you do here.
Think the issue is what constitutes 'intelligence' at all. Forget computers.
This article breaks down how the cell behaves down the the molecules. Once each part is pulled apart and examined, where did the 'intelligence' go.
The single cell, looks 'intelligent'. But, when it is all pulled apart we don't find it. It is just chemicals, reactions, physics.
Then, scale that up to multi-cellular organism, then human, its all just mechanistic, chemicals, physics. So where did the intelligence come from? Humans are also just twitching flagella.
This article just makes it a more stark idea, because a single cell appears 'intelligent', but we can pull it apart and examine the constitutive parts, the chemical, molecules.
So there is not much wiggle room for philosophy or souls. It looks intelligent, but look, we can peer under a microscope and don't see the intelligence.
Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
#45The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building one. Is the RIP routing protocol a complex adaptive system?
Part of our problem is the way we think. I am a person. I am not a complex adaptive system. And yet I am. I am made of entities. There is a messaging bus, the entities sense, act and interact. But I don't think of myself as a CAS or talk about We. Wecellfs?
Perhaps this a Sapir-Whorf thing. Our language limits what we can think. What is the difference between a pile of ants and an ant colony? A colony is collection of entities, but what do we call the entity that is the colony? Are the ants smart or is the colony smart.
Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't simulate the intelligence of a cell using just a handfull of analogue components. Cell intelligence is still beyond us. People tend to underestimated cells just like you do here.
Article subtitle: The story of E. coli chemotaxis I'm not thinking of simulating the whole cell. And last I heard, a DC full of computers can't fully simulate one sucrose molecule.
E. coli does a lot more things than what is described in the article, the article just gives an extremely simplified view of the cells intelligence. They react to all sorts of substances in reality and decides where to go based on all of those, not just a simple "go towards good place" behavior. It is cool that they mapped out how it behaves in a simple environment, but you can do the same thing with humans, if you put a human in a simple experiment you can create similarly simple rules for human behavior.
And even if you just look at the behavior described in the article that would still require quite a bit of components since you would need to accumulate signals and normalize them and then turn that to oscillating control signals. Computing via chemical processes like cells do makes the computations a lot simpler.
Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
#47On the one hand, this is extremely cool science. OTOH, English really needs another word, meaning "like intelligence, but it could be simulated by an analog computer with a good handful of of discrete components".
I think intelligence is the correct word. Why not?
Useful languages can succinctly distinguish things which are qualitatively quite different. Describing everything in the world as "intelligent" sounds kinda cool and Zen, and may reflect some peoples' worldviews - but it also make "intelligent" pretty useless as an adjective.
Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
#48I would love to understand how individual cells come together to form functioning organs with clear boundaries.
Self-organizing brownie swarms manage the whole process from the ethereal plane.
Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't simulate the intelligence of a cell using just a handfull of analogue components. Cell intelligence is still beyond us. People tend to underestimated cells just like you do here.
Think the issue is what constitutes 'intelligence' at all. Forget computers. This article breaks down how the cell behaves down the the molecules. Once each part is pulled apart and examined, where did the 'intelligence' go. The single cell, looks 'intelligent'. But, when it is all pulled apart we don't find it. It is just chemicals, reactions, physics. Then, scale that up to multi-cellular organism, then human, its…
> This article breaks down how the cell behaves down the the molecules
No, just for a single molecule. The cell does a lot more than that. Can read this if you want to learn a bit more.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6194112/
> So there is not much wiggle room for philosophy or souls. It looks intelligent, but look, we can peer under a microscope and don't see the intelligence.
Sure, but we still can't replicate its behavior in a natural environment, just simple lab environments.
Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis
#50> I never liked the way biology was taught in high school. It was too much about the names of things. A subject so vast is spoiled by a textbook, which can only point at the endless parade of stuff-there-is-to-know.
Amen. You could easily teach quite intricate biology in grade school, if you focused on a fascinating example or two. How many more people would be inspired, rather than bored?